TC39 is obviously not the right place for FFI, but the subject can be
discussed.
I and my former team did develop (modestly) quite a lot of stuff as well
that could be called FFI, result : 0 in the middle/long term
Hopefully now the web gets some nice things like node.js at server side
But at device level, it should be up to vendors to propose a unified,
performant and cross browser js interface, personnaly I will not go any
more into the nightmare I described in my previous email, and I think
less and less people will
It's a paradox, while the iphone brought light, shadow follows now with
every vendor/platform thinking they can specify whatever they like, and
others thinking they can shut down whatever they like (tip : the name
starts by a G)
Le 22/05/2012 19:17, Wes Garland a écrit :
On 22 May 2012 12:54, Aymeric Vitte <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I don't see how a FFI could really help developers.
FFIs are certainly helpful in many situations. I don't think this is
one of them.
Let me relay a relevant xperience. We develop applications in
"Server-Side JavaScript". We have an FFI that, with some magic
compile-time shims and a few other tricks, lets us write
close-to-the-bare-metal applications that are portable without
platform detection across many operating systems -- in fact, I
believe, to any conformant SUSv3 implementation. We write
nearly-C-like code on Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X, 32 and 64 bit, to
give us nice JS libraries on top of the ugly, bare metal.
Our implementation is complete enough that we were able to write a
complete WebSockets implementation in JS, that runs on many platforms,
with no direct support in the host environment other than FFI, right
down to the networking system calls, including the magic macros for
select (FD_CLR et al).
Sounds great, right? Well, it is for us, but it would make a lousy
direction for a standard: the resultant JS is completely non-portable
to Windows. Or QNX. Or Gronch. Or a myriad of other operating systems.
And that's the real problem. We have overcome the typical "C porting"
problems -- endianness, word size, whether fstat() is a function or a
macro, etc..... but we're still nowhere close to being portable to
where the web needs to run. If we want to run anywhere, we would need
to FFI up one layer of abstraction, to something like APR or NSPR, and
then guess what? We would be no better off in any way than what the
standards guys have been up to -- and far, far, worse off in many.
That's why I believe TC-39 is not the right place for a JS FFI.
Wes
--
Wesley W. Garland
Director, Product Development
PageMail, Inc.
+1 613 542 2787 x 102
--
jCore
Email : [email protected]
Web : www.jcore.fr
Webble : www.webble.it
Extract Widget Mobile : www.extractwidget.com
BlimpMe! : www.blimpme.com
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
